Communists clean up the `Black Hole'

A FEW thousand kilometres to the north, in Moscow, the Communists were looking forward to getting their hands on power once again. But in Calcutta, where a four-day conference of the party culminated yesterday in a mass celebration of the old verities, the Communists never went away.

Communist-led governments have ruled the state of West Bengal almost continuously since 1967. And one extraordinary man has dominated the politics of the state for the whole of that period, and has been chief minister continuously for 21 years.

Jyoti Basu, 84 last month, is the longest-serving chief minister in the country. Two years ago he nearly became Prime Minister. He continues to dominate both his party and his state with little apparent effort.

Yesterday, 20,000 people braved monsoon showers to listen as Mr Basu urged the Congress Party to abandon its economic liberalisation policies and unite with the Communist Party to bring down the government, led by the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party. He chided his members for arrogance and urged them to "serve the people better". When he had finished, the crowd cheered and cheered.

Thanks to the Black Hole, the work of Mother Teresa among the dying, and horrifying anecdotes from returning travellers, Calcutta probably has a more terrible image than any other city. Kipling called it the City of Dreadful Night. A century later Dominique Lapierre tried on a new tag, "City of Joy", but it failed to stick. Calcutta was the modern urban nightmare at its most extreme: Victorian-style population density, pollution and callousness married to ignorance and apathy, compounded by wave after wave of refugees from war, famine and flood.

In 1967 the British town planner, Colin Buchanan, reported that Calcutta was "a city in a state of crisis. We have not seen human degradation on a comparable scale in any other city in the world". The city, he went on, was "rapidly approaching the point of breakdown in its economy, housing, sanitation, transport and the essential humanities of life".

Today Calcutta remains a formidable city, but the breakdown has not happened. In several respects, it is doing much better than India's other great cities. Power cuts are rare: in India, that alone is practically a miracle. Calcutta used to be notorious for its beggars; today, even outside the smartest hotels, they are few and have the air of part-timers.

Delhi has been talking about building a mass transit system for as long as anyone can remember. Calcutta has India's only metro: one line, 16.5kms in length, plain but reliable, flat fare about 5p. In the Sixties and Seventies, Calcutta was lawless; today, after Draconian laws were passed to crackdown on the gangsters, it is "quiet", according to my taxi driver.

Much of the credit for this transformation must go to Mr Basu, the neat, unsmiling, uncharismatic, fastidious-looking doctor's son who converted to communism while a law student in London in the Thirties. "He is a fresh politician," one of his supporters told me at yesterday's rally - an odd word to use about someone who has been around so long. He clarified: "No allegation has been laid against him, no charge."

Mr Basu is that most treasurable figure in the Indian landscape: an apparently incorruptible politician.

In Howrah, across the Hooghly River from Calcutta, Mr Basu's supporters were indulging in the old-time religion. Files of men marched in behind red-star flags, chanting: "Inkalab zindabad" ("Long live the revolution"). Thousands of hammer-and-sickle flags fluttered. Posters of Marx, Engels, Lenin and Stalin were on sale. You could have mistaken it for a British May Day gathering, the difference being that here the party was in power, having been democratically elected time after time.

"No other land and people can offer such difficult ground as this one, for anyone demanding unity and solidarity of effort from his supporters," wrote Geoffrey Moorhouse in his book, Calcutta.

Yet that very diversity may be the key to communism's success here. Better than any other creed on offer, certainly better than the divisive Hindu nationalism espoused by the BJP, Marxism offers a useful myth of common interest.

And in the hands of someone as wily as Mr Basu, who has lured more foreign investments than any other state except Maharashtra, while continuing to declaim the gospel of revolution, it continues to persuade West Bengal's masses that they have something to believe in, while growing - very gradually - more prosperous.